Classical liberalism’s conservative opponents

18th century classical liberalism is the theory of government on which the US founding was based. It has been in the forefront of the battle against progressivism for over a century. Since President Trump’s 2016 election, however, it faces powerful opposition from conservative nationalists.

by Richard Schulman

Classical liberalism is the Enlightenment theory and practice of government embodied in the United States’ 1776 Declaration of Independence, the 1787 Constitution, and the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed during the Lincoln and Grant administrations. Classical liberalism has been continually under attack since then, by the Progressives who dominate the Democratic Party but also, recently, by factions within the conservative movement.

The discussion that follows addresses the opposition to classical liberalism within the conservative moment since the 2016 election of President Trump. Thus, Yoram Hazony asks “Is ‘classical liberalism’ conservative?” (Wall Street Journal Oct. 14, 2017) and decides that No, it is cosmopolitan and globalist. An American Greatness columnist asserts that “Libertarians are handing America over to socialists.” And Patrick Deneen, writing in American Compass, calls for “Taking Back America From the Libertarians.”

Not all conservative intellectuals have joined the national-conservative campaign against classical liberalism. George Will hasn’t. Nor Allen Guelzo. Libertarian think tanks, economists, and lawyers haven’t. Nor the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. Nor this publication.

Liberalism in Europe; US fusionism

Classical liberalism and its US embodiment became the defining aspiration of European republicans, whether by revolution or reform, up through the mid 19th century. With the partial or complete defeat of Europe’s republican revolutions in 1848 and the subsequent rise of Marxism, social democracy, and welfare governments, European liberal parties faced increasing competition from statist-oriented parties and pressures to compromise their limited-government principles. Nevertheless, traditional liberal parties still survive in many European countries.

During the Cold War, classical liberals, libertarians, and conservatives in the US worked in close political alliance to defeat communism and the Soviet Union. That alliance went under the name of “fusionism” and was backed strongly by William F. Buckley’s National Review and Buckley himself on his widely viewed “Firing Line” public affairs television program. The fusionist alliance dominated US conservatism from 1955 through the fall of the Berlin Wall. It began falling apart after the defeat of Soviet Communism. Its disintegration became especially noticeable since the 2016 election.

This is puzzling because the alliance is still needed: the US now finds itself in a new Cold War with Communist China. Yet conservative nationalist publications such as American Greatness are dead set against continuing or reviving fusionism, writing that “Fusionism committed to a muscular foreign policy, social and moral traditionalism, and free markets….[W]e owe the concept a debt of gratitude….But it’s time to put it out to pasture, for the good of America.”

Classical liberals vs. libertarians

Classical liberalism is often confused with libertarianism. Both share a common commitment to limited government and individual rights. Both labels were developed uniquely in the US because the term “liberal” was pirated by the Progressive movement to conceal the extent to which that movement was departing from the revered principles of the American founding. Everywhere else in the world, liberalism maintains its original meaning as the republican theory of limited government; with separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial powers; equality of citizens under the law; and guarantee of the natural rights of the individual from infringement by the state.

Libertarians, however, often look to 20th century sources for the foundation of their commitments to liberty and individual autonomy. Some libertarians look to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia; some to the writings of Murray Rothbard and Mises Institute; and some to the novels of Ayn Rand. Meanwhile, there is a Libertarian Party, which is running its own presidential candidate nationwide.

A limited vs. a minimal state

Classical liberals, however, define themselves on the basis of the Enlightenment ideas that produced the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Among these were the writings of Locke, Montesquieu, the Whigs and Commonwealth men of the English Civil War and early 18th century, as well as classical political thought going back to classical Greece and Rome. Classical liberals favor a limited state but not, as many libertarians do, a minimal state. As Richard Epstein, a prominent classical liberal, puts the matter:

[T]he Constitution is not a libertarian document. Most emphatically, it is a classical liberal document that allows for both taxation and eminent domain.

The classical liberal constitution: the uncertain quest for limited government (Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 193.

On many issues, however, classical liberals and libertarians are in agreement. Even where this is not the case, they are usually lumped together indiscriminately by their opponents.

The conservative nationalist attacks on classical liberalism and libertarianism circle around three principal themes:

1. anti-originalism;
2. hyper-nationalism;
3. statist economics.

1. Anti-originalism

It is commonly thought that the conservative movement has been won over to originalism as the default mode of interpreting the Constitution. (Originalism is the interpretative doctrine of reading the Constitution in terms of the commonly understood meaning of words at the time the Constitution was written.) But the statist economics that national conservatism favors does not fit comfortably in the limited-government framework of the 1787 Constitution. Originalist constitutional interpretation is thus a threat to ambitious statist economic programs.

An important group of conservative Catholic constitutional scholars has come to the rescue. They oppose originalism and have provided an alternative: common good constitutionalism. Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School and Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame are the leaders of this new interpretive doctrine. Vermeule writes:

In recent years, allegiance to the constitutional theory known as originalism has become all but mandatory for American legal conservatives….But originalism has now outlived its utility, and has become an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation. Such an approach—one might call it “common-good constitutionalism”—should be based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.

Sectarian dangers

The basic problem with Vermeule and Deneen’s constitutional vision is that even Christians don’t agree on what the common good is. Nor do most US citizens, and perhaps even most Catholics, look forward to redefining the Constitution in terms of Catholic integralism. Vermeule and Deneen are basically proposing a sectarian living constitution as the conservative alternative to the secularist living constitution of the Progressives.

This, however, would be an invitation to plunging the US into religious wars that this country — unlike Europe during the 16th and first half of the 17th century — has happily avoided (First Amendment court cases excepted). Originalist interpretations of the Constitution, while they don’t solve all interpretative questions, certainly do offer a more objective and historically grounded starting point.

2. Hyper-nationalism

Meanwhile, Yoram Hazony’s book, The virtue of nationalism, is being cited to justify the exaggerated nationalism of the conservative nationalists. Most people understand that nationalism can be either positive and admirable or destructive and despicable. Hazony’s revisionist book claims that only positive nationalism exists — that negative, destructive nationalism is really something else, “imperialism.” Thus German nationalism under Hitler — ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer — wasn’t true nationalism because of its imperial ambition to found a supra-national Third Reich or Empire. But Hitler’s vehicle for his conquest of Europe, like Russia and China’s similar territorial expansionism today, was clearly fueled by extreme nationalism.

Hazony, a philosopher, discredits himself by claiming that the classical liberal thinker John Locke was a rationalist (“bad”), whereas nationalists are empiricists (“good”). It will be news to most people that Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a rationalist treatise. Hazony’s proof of Locke’s “rationalism,” it turns out, is Locke’s belief in natural rights. Thus, one of conservative nationalism’s star ideologues not only fails Philosophy 101 but also reveals himself to have more in common with Jeremy Bentham, for whom natural rights were “nonsense on stilts,” than the American Revolution and Declaration, which are based on natural rights.

The nation as a gathering of tribes

Hazony, an Israeli, also has a bizarre definition of nation:

By nation, I mean a number of tribes with a common language or religion, and a past history of acting as a body for the common defense and other large-scale enterprises.

The virtue of nationalism, p. 18

That definition would apply well to the Muslim nations neighboring Israel. It doesn’t apply to the US and other developed-sector nations that emerged out of civil societies rather than tribes.

Inappopriateness of Hazony’s theory to the US

Hazony denies that a nation can be formed on the basis of a creed and that classical liberalism can co-exist with nationhood as he understands it. If Hazony were consistent, he would have to deny that the US is a nation, for it is constituted on a creedal basis — adherence to the Declaration and the Constitution — and both these documents are classical liberal.

Classical liberalism — liberalism as it was understood in the 18th and 19th centuries — was the doctrine of the reform-minded patriots in Europe and Latin America, in many cases inspired by the US example. There was and is no inconsistency between classical liberalism and nation-state patriotism. They were inseparable during the early 19th century. Classical-liberal national leaders included the Marquis de Lafayette, Alexis de Tocqueville, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and many others.

Cosmopolitanism in Hayek and Mises

Hazony does catch classical liberal economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in utopian speculations concerning a hypthetical world that no longer needs separate nations. Mises is also on record regretting that labor is not free to flow across national borders so as to better match labor power with the capital investments that make it more productive.

Both men greatly enriched classical liberalism, but it is hardly just to take their every sentence as gospel. Hayek and Mises were outstanding economists — probably the greatest the 20th century produced. But they were economists, not political theorists.

In the world we live in and will continue living in for the foreseeable future, classical liberalism will require functioning nation states for its flourishing. Overwhelming a classical liberal polity with immigrants imbued with cultures opposed to it — and likely to be dependent on welfare support for an extended period — is political folly. The European Union should have learned that lesson by now.

Hazony, however, irresponsibly suppresses the truth that the two Austrian economists did more than anyone else in providing the defining intellectual arguments against the two great 20th century enemies of classical liberalism and viable nation states — socialism and the welfare state. See Mises’ Socialism and Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom for the evidence.

But while it is intelligent policy for a polity to avoid being overwhelmed by immigrants hostile to its political and moral culture, it is folly to extend that precept to excluding all those immigrants who could assimilate and bring new skills and talents with them. That openness to immigrants who wished to become Americans has been key to US prosperity. It is now endangered from two directions: by the identity politics of the Democrats, that oppose assimilation, and President Trump’s immigration-restrictionism that keeps them out altogether. Conservative nationalists instead of criticizing the president’s restrictionist policies have been endorsing them.

3. Statist economics

President Trump, unlike President Reagan, did not enter the White House with an intellectual grounding in classical liberal ideas — to say the least. Unsurprisingly, soon after his installation in the White House, he began pursuing a protectionist trade agenda he believed would “make America great again.”

His leading opponent in the Republican primaries, Ted Cruz, did have a classical liberal background. But the Republican Party, despite its knowledge of and misgivings about Trump’s past associations with New York City Democrats and Democratic Party ideas — didn’t do what it could have done to secure a stronger Republican presidential candidate. It could have put extreme pressure on both Marco Rubio and, more importantly, the narcissistic spoiler John Kasich, to withdraw from the primaries so that the large field of candidates would no longer split the anti-Trump vote. That would have been fair to both Trump and Cruz.

Trump did not win the primary in a fair vote because the Republican opposition to him remained split. The Democratic National Committee did not repeat that fiasco in its 2020 primary. It worked hard to prevent the many Democratic presidential candidates from continuing to split the anti-Sanders vote.

A surprise win and predictable ensuing problems

When Trump in the 2016 election surprised everyone, including probably himself, by defeating the disliked and discredited Hillary Clinton, he arrived disorganized in Washington, DC. Positively, he began nominating Federalist Society judges and working with the Senate on a tax reform bill which passed and brought the country to the lowest unemployment rate it had enjoyed for many decades. He exited the Paris Agreement and unlocked domestic US energy production potential.

Negatively, however, he brought about the demoralizing defeat of the health care reform bill that he and the Republican Party had been promising the electorate throughout President Obama’s two preceding terms. The repeal bill was defeated by the single negative vote of the dying Senator John McCain, a war hero whose patriotism Trump had gratuitously insulted and who avenged himself by casting the deciding vote against ACA (Obamacare) repeal.

The President’s trade war debacle

No less destructively, President Trump launched a trade war with key allied trading partners, starting with tariffs on washing machines and steel and aluminum imports. The metals tariffs were falsely rationalized as being necessary for national defense, despite the Pentagon’s demurral. He also started a continually escalating tariff war with China and began undercutting the World Trade Organization, which the US had helped found and that had promoted the economic interests of both the US and its trading partners.

Trump claimed that his tariffs were going to increase US manufacturing employment and reduce the deficit. As predicted, they did neither. Trump has had to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in welfare payments to the farmers whose exports collapsed in the wake of foreign retaliation to the Trump tariffs. Trump also took the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a key security-economic alliance of the US with eleven other Pacific nations from which China was excluded.

Disappointing growth and investment

The chaos and uncertainty of the president’s tariffs and trade war threats against all and sundry brought US capital investment to a standstill. It didn’t make America great but rather unpopular, untrusted, and poorer. Even prior to the Wuhan virus pandemic reaching US shores, growth fell to 2% from the 4% that Trump and his economic advisers had predicted would result from the tax reform bill. That 4% growth rate could have been attained had Trump not launched his protectionist trade wars.

Treason of the clerks

President Trump claims that China is paying for US import tariffs whereas in fact the bill is being paid by US manufacturers (in the case of intermediate products) and US consumers (in the case of final goods). Despite the President’s deficient understanding of basic economics, he immediately found support from conservative nationalist intellectuals. As George Will wrote, “Regimes, however intellectually disreputable, rarely are unable to attract intellectuals eager to rationalize the regimes’ behavior. America’s current administration has ‘national conservatives.’”

The two most important publications advocating pro-Trumpian statist economics are American Greatness (closely linked with the two Claremont publications, The American Mind and the Claremont Review) and Oren Cass’s American Compass. The latter has staked itself out as the organizing center for a Republican industrial policy.

Enter Senator Warren

The industrial policy being promoted by American Compass coincides in many points with Elizabeth Warren’s program. At the July 2019 National Conservatism Conference, speaker Tucker Carlson took note of this new political reality by announcing that

the main threat to Americans living the lives they want to live comes from business, not government. He praised Democratic Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, which she co-authored with her daughter, as “one of the best books on economics” he has read and more important than anything social conservatives have written recently.

https://unherd.com/2019/07/can-national-conservatism-reunite-the-nation/

Government deemed wiser than markets

Both the conservative nationalists and Elizabeth Warren believe government can do a better job allocating investments than American businesses; that businesses must be cajoled or compelled to re-shore manufacturing to the US (for example, by local content requirements); that a new government agency dedicated to industrial policy needs to be established; and that government-run re-training programs for workers are needed.

The classical liberal approach is to remove the many regulatory and tax impediments to research and capital investment but not descend into the business of picking industrial champions, à la Japan in the 1980s or China today. Instead, raw materials, intermediate goods, and final products of critical importance to national security can be sourced from allies and/or stockpiled.

Sourcing in coordination with allies is not only good economics but also good foreign policy and national defense.

Infrastructure spending

Infrastructure investment should be similarly confined to carefully defined projects addressing national security requirements or public good investments with positive externalities — such as EMP resilience, cybersecurity protection, and planetary exploration — rather than the blowout expenditures now contemplated by both Democrats and the present administration on the pretext of hastening recovery from the pandemic.

The US was founded and became a great nation on the basis of classical liberalism. It prevailed against the Soviet Union during the first Cold War by a fusionist alliance of classical liberals with conservatives on the Republican side, and conservative, pre-identity-politics Democrats in that party. We face a similar existential challenge from China, Russia, and their allies today. Hence, there is a similar need to revive the fusionist alliance among Republicans and not take the US down the foolish statist-economic path that brought down the USSR and plunged Japan into two decades of minimal economic growth.